The term e-commerce is used to refer to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted via e-commerce has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. As a result, a variety of websites have been established to offer goods and services.
Search engines are useful tools for locating specific pages of information on the World Wide Web and are increasingly used to locate goods and services. As a result, many websites use search advertising/search engine marketing to attract visitors to product, service, and/or category landing pages. Search advertising describes the placement of online advertisements adjacent or amongst the search results returned by a search engine in response to a specific search query. Search engine marketing typically involves paying for a specific online advertisement or creative to be featured in or adjacent to the search results provided in response to a specific query. Typically, the position of an advertisement within the returned search results is a function of the bid scaled by a quality factor that measures the relevance of the creative and landing page combination to the search query. Accordingly, the provider of the search engine is incentivized to feature relevant keyword/advertisement/landing page combinations so that users will select featured advertisements and increase the revenue generated by the search engine provider. In the context of paid search advertising, the term keyword refers to both a single word and a specific combination of words or keyword components.
When a website includes a large number of products or services, the process of building and managing a paid search advertising campaign can be quite complex. Many search engines provide the ability to upload an entire advertising campaign including one or more creatives that target a set of keywords, and associated bids to be used when the display of the creative is triggered by specific keywords. For example, Google, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., defines an Ad Group file format that enables advertisers to upload paid search advertising campaigns.